Jiro
2mo ago
Gang members who are attacked by police don't get to attack back on the grounds that the police are enemy combatants. The gang members aren't a state.
Jiro
2mo ago
There is a separate point to be made that no insurgency has actually overthrown a state per see.
Haiti? (Though you can quibble on what "a state" means since France still existed).
Jiro
2mo ago
The probability of your vote mattering is tiny, but if it does matter it matters for hundreds of millions of people, which makes up for the small probability of it mattering.
There's also the question of how you count whether a vote "matters" *which amounts to the same thing phrased differently). If someone wins by 1000 votes, nobody's vote mattered in the sense that their vote alone would have changed the result. But 1000 people's votes mattered in the sense that as a group it would have changed the result, and each of the 1000 people should get credit for 1/1000 of a result mattering. And it's arbitrary in what order you count the votes--you could just as well say that the first 1000 votes mattered as you could say that the last one did.
Jiro
2mo ago
You are in a rich person's bubble if you think $100 is unimportant enough that someone would give it up in order to vote.
Jiro
2mo ago
There's a difference between a lack of reaction from someone who doesn't react to other things, and a lack of reaction from someone who does. You are in the former category. The leftists who are being criticized here are in the latter. When people obsess over a lot of anti-Trump political causes, it's not an answer to say "what can they do about the assassination, obsess over it?"
(Of course the school shooting is a false equivalence. The school shooting is not done for political reasons, and failure to support gun bans isn't to failure to react.)
Jiro
2mo ago
I wonder if they will ever have a "Physician, heal thyself moment."
Biden was metooed in 2020. It made no difference.
Jiro
2mo ago
Getting the government to force someone to give you money counts as knowing how money works.
Jiro
2mo ago
Covid is an example of how a publicly funded healthcare system cannot be trusted to tell you what counts as triage. They have no skin in the game, no incentive to make decisions that actually maximize health. If your father dies, they don't even get upset.
Jiro
2mo ago
The idea is that overburdening the health care system risks other people's lives, so you're actually still comparing your life to lives, not your life to an amorphous system.
Of course, even this version can be criticized in the way that socialism in general can be criticized.
Jiro
2mo ago
Would you accept a rollback on trans issues, gun control, immigration, and other right-wing issues in order to get allies against climate change? Because that's the problem. Climate change is urgent when it comes to "you have to give up something" but is suddenly not so urgent when it comes to "we have to give up something".
Jiro
2mo ago
Let’s imagine some white CEO stammering to the minority police officer,
If the arresting officer has a thick Latino accent, he is a working class minority police officer.
There's also the question of whether someone has relatives back in China who can be threatened--that isn't going to disappear if they lose Chinese citizenship.
I don't see why citizenship even matters here. Nobody cares that someone in the US can vote in China; they care that they may be an agent for China's government. Getting US citizenship doesn't prevent that. If anything, getting US citizenship makes it worse because the agent can't be deported.
Jiro
2mo ago
If everybody loved it, it wouldn't have to be mandatory, and it's not pointless in principle, just the way it's set up nowadays is
While most people hated school, they did so for different reasons. Rationalists hated school for reasons that are strong enough that becoming adults won't change their mind--bullies, incompetent teaching, they already know what's being taught, etc. Normies hated school for reasons such as "I can't play video games if I have to study for an exam". Adults don't agree with those reasons.
For the vast majority, who hated school for normie reasons, school is not a downside, even if it was at the moment they were actually attending school. The view that even from an adult perspective school is bad is weird.
Jiro
2mo ago
Unfortunately the same mechanisms that are used to suppress these things for good reasons are used to suppress them for bad reasons, and it's impossible to tell them apart.
Germany, on the other hand, was one of the most advanced countries in Europe
The Soviets were treated in the media as one of the most advanced countries in the world.
I'll suggest the conflict theory explanation instead: The average person doesn't think Communism is very bad because decades of leftist media propaganda has tried to minimize any bad things that Communists did from at least the 1960s until Communism died out. And even afterwards, they never tried to stir up hysteria about Communists being around every corner like they did with fascists.
Normies do not exist
You just said that right after a section which said "most people are affected by emotional impact, not logical arguments like you guys are". That's pretty much "normies exist".
Acting like a rationalist is weird. Being convinced like a rationalist would be convinced is doubly so.
Jiro
2mo ago
You could probably get the same by using classical spy work
At some point, which they've long passed, making spying easier in effect grants the spies new capabilities, even though they "already could do that". (This applies to domestic spying too. The NSA could send out an agent to surveil any target that is caught up in Echelon, but surveilling everyone makes things so much easier that there's no comparison.)
Jiro
2mo ago
If most people cannot even comprehend the ECP, how is democracy anywhere near a reasonable regime?
Because they can comprehend things like "I shouldn't be lynched", and voting for "I shouldn't be lynched" is inextricably tied to voting for how the government acts on the market.
Jiro
2mo ago
2nd edition: "Alignment shows the general behavior of the average monster of that type. Exceptions, though uncommon, may be encountered."
Jiro
2mo ago
Look, way back in the 70s, D&D players were raising questions about the "Always Chaotic Evil" trope.
No, they weren't. "Always __ evil" was a 3rd edition exclusive, and didn't apply to orcs anyway. Anyone who says this, particularly using the exact phrasing "Always Chaotic Evil", is probably quoting TV Tropes or imitating a meme copied from TV Tropes.
Jiro
2mo ago
There are systems in place that prevent politicians from calling each other foreign traitors, paedophiles and fraudsters and then having everyone credulously believe them, guaranteeing their victory.
The "system" that prevents this is the "everyone" part. A politician who calls a scientist a fraudster under your system doesn't have to convince everyone--he just needs to convince the police and a judge.
Human wisdom is surely capable of distinguishing between imperfection, negligence and fraud.
No it isn't. That's why I gave that example.
There's also the question of malicious actors. You not only need the ability to distinguish between those, you need the ability to distinguish between those when faced by a hostile actor who is deliberately blurring them. You may know what negligence is, but if some politician looking for a scapegoat pointed to imperfection and said "that's negligence", would you be able to prove the politician wrong?
Jiro
2mo ago
In the past I've made this sort of argument and been rebuffed by some people on the grounds that if we imposed very severe punishments then people would just double down on lying and blaming others to escape liability. Plus it would disincentivize people from taking up important roles.
Remember the scientists convicted of manslaughter for earthquake predictions? If you severely punish scientists for harming someone, you're going to get tons of cases like this. A lot of scientists don't have political connections and therefore are easy scapegoats. Don't think "well, we could have been able to catch these scientists who really were responsible for lives" but rather "what else would we be enabling, by making it easier to catch these scientists?" (Yes, they were exonerated later, but the point still stands.)
Also, pretty much anything you do on a large scale involves lives. Approve a drug a little late and lives are lost if people couldn't get the drug. Approve a drug a little early and lives may be lost to side effects or displacing better drugs from the market. Support cars that run on fossil fuels and get dinged for all the lives lost to pollution or global warming. If you punish scientists for things that they do on a large scale that cost lives, you will no longer have scientists, because everything on that scale costs lives if you do it wrong and no human is 100% perfect.
This is like the guy on datasecretslox who claimed not to know what race is. People know what right-wing is to enough of a degree to be able to talk about it, even if you can "well, aksually" the edge cases.
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